With national elections this weekend, generals and Mubarak supporters still in charge

Candidate profiles

Mohammed Morsi

Morsi, 60, is a USC-educated engineer who has taught at universities in the U.S. and Egypt and previously served in Egypt’s parliament. Backed by Egypt’s strongest political group, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate has promised a stronger application of Islamic law if elected.

Ahmed Shafiq

A retired general who served as the last prime minister under Mubarak. Shafiq, 70, has run as a secular candidate with a strong law-and-order message, promising to restore order and stability to Egypt and warning that a victory by Morsi could send Egypt spiraling into religious conflict. Backed by many of Mubarak’s former supporters, Shafiq finished second in the initial round of voting last month.

CAIRO 
In the hours before Egyptians head to the polls in a runoff presidential election, the revolutionaries whose movement prompted the vote were in disarray. With no candidate, and following a judicial ruling that dissolved the parliament elected last fall, some revolutionaries conceded Friday their failure to win real reforms has exposed a lack of organization and strategy.

With two days of voting beginning today, they acknowledged their only plan is to stop Ahmed Shafiq, a holdover from the regime of deposed President Hosni Mubarak, from winning the election and taking back the state through the ballot box. Although Shafiq appears to be the front-runner, rebels spent Friday grudgingly urging allies to vote for his rival, Muslim Brotherhood member Mohammed Morsi, hours after some had called on him to withdraw.

“The revolution was hijacked by a military that wanted to carry out a coup. And the Brotherhood is killing the revolution,” said Mohammed Hasan, 21, an education student and member of the April 6 revolutionary group, as he marched to Cairo’s Tahrir Square. “But I have no choice. I must vote for Morsi or die.”

Egypt on Friday in many ways resembled the state before Mubarak stepped down 16 months ago in what was originally called a revolution. Mubarak’s vast, opaque system of government remained intact, still guided by the ruling council of military generals and backed by a Mubarak-created judiciary. The revolutionaries who called for major change were a fractured group, too weak to go head-to-head against that system. Egypt’s most organized political force, the Brotherhood, reached for power even as other anti-regime elements feared what kind of Egypt they might create.

At least two parliament members who ran under the banner of revolution announced they’d support Shafiq, Mubarak’s former prime minister, in what seemed to be a political calculation.

“I was the happiest person when the ruling” dissolved parliament, said one of the lawmakers, Mohammed Abu Hamed. “I saw the way the Brotherhood worked in parliament. The way they pushed their views and opinions was frightening. Shafiq is the most capable of fulfilling the demands of the revolution.”

Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court ruled Thursday one-third of the parliament had been elected illegally during last fall’s elections. State-backed judges said afterward the entire legislative body — composed largely of Muslim Brotherhood members — must be dissolved, leaving the ruling military council as the only political entity that could draft laws and craft a new constitution.